Bill Quay Primary School

Overview

Bill Quay Primary School in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, caters for more than 100 four – 11 year old children, who are supported by currently 40 teaching and support staff delivering a broad curriculum.

As part of its continuous improvement drive to secure teaching performance standards, the school uses Mesma self-assessment and improvement planning software – a move that’s recently helped it to retain a Good Ofsted inspection report.

Head teacher Toni Hilton says its important for her leadership team to keep abreast of critical aspects of the school’s management and operations as well retaining an active participation in the process of self-evaluation and development planning.

However, this has to also be reconciled with the Ofsted expectations of the governors, who are looking to ensure teaching continues to succeed and the school meets the needs of the children.

How We Helped

The senior management team and others have access to a good deal of data and information, so there’s naturally pressure on the co-ordination and management of many Ofsted critical administrative tasks and functions.

“However this process, which can be time consuming and challenging, has improved after we adopted the Mesma system school-wide.”

“It’s proving to be a versatile and extremely cost effective online resource, enabling us to easily set-up our personalised accounts and allocate whole swathes of self-assessment reporting and improvement planning to individuals in school.”

Intuitive properties are a key feature of the software: head teachers can incorporate their guidance notes to allow other members of staff to add and store their own information to ensure all relevant documentation is up-to-date and readily accessible during inspection.

The technology allows people to upload their own self-assessment contributions, saving time and improving access to information such as Ofsted reports, policy documents, quality assurance processes and guidelines, minutes of meetings, school performance data and other documentation. These are stored online in one place within a secure area on Mesma, while tasks and duties allocated to staff can be tracked and monitor to ensure they are being progressed and completed.

We have been able to demonstrate to Ofsted that retaining our ‘Good’ status was based in no small measure to having the relevant information to hand during inspection. This was down to the value of having a good quality, highly effective self-assessment and improvement-planning tool.